§46 A short history of interactive fiction

The history of interactive fiction in the twentieth century has yet to
be written. One outline might be as follows: an age of precursors and
university games, 1972–81; the commercial boom, 1982–6;
a period of nostalgia among Internet users for text while the industry
completed the move to graphical games, 1987–91; and the age of
the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction and its annual
competition, of shorter stories moving away from genres and puzzles,
1992–9.

§46.1 Precursors and university games 1972–81

Perhaps the first adventurer was a mulatto slave
named Stephen Bishop, born about 1820: “slight, graceful, and
very handsome”; a “quick, daring, enthusiastic” guide
to the Mammoth Cave in the Kentucky karst. The story of the Cave is a
curious microcosm of American history. Its discovery is a matter of
legend dating back to the 1790s; it is said that a hunter, John Houchin,
pursued a wounded bear to a large pit near the Green River and stumbled
upon the entrance. The entrance was thick with bats and by the War of
1812 was intensively mined for guano, dissolved into nitrate vats to make
saltpetre for gunpowder. After the war prices fell, but the Cave became
a minor side-show when a desiccated Indian mummy was found nearby, sitting
upright in a stone coffin, surrounded by talismans. In 1815, Fawn Hoof,
as she was nicknamed after one of the charms, was taken away by a circus,
drawing crowds across America (a tour rather reminiscent of Don McLean's
song “The Legend of Andrew McCrew”). She ended up in the
Smithsonian but by the 1820s the Cave was being called one of the wonders
of the world, largely due to her posthumous efforts.

By the early nineteenth century European caves were
big tourist attractions, but hardly anyone visited the Mammoth,
“wonder of the world” or not. Nor was it then especially large,
as the name was a leftover from the miners, who boasted of mammoth yields
of guano. In 1838, Stephen Bishop's owner bought up the Cave. Stephen,
as (being a slave) he was invariably called, was by any standards a
remarkable man: self-educated in Latin and Greek, he became famous as
the “chief ruler” of his underground realm. He explored and
named much of the layout in his spare time, doubling the known map in
a year. The distinctive flavour of the Cave's names – half homespun American,
half classical – started with Stephen: the
River Styx, the Snowball Room, Little Bat Avenue, the Giant Dome. Stephen
found strange blind fish, snakes, silent crickets, the remains of cave
bears (savage, playful creatures, five feet long and four high, which
became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age), centuries-old Indian
gypsum workings and ever more cave. His 1842 map, drafted entirely from
memory, was still in use forty years later.

After a brief period of misguided philanthropy in which
the caves were used as a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, tourism
took over. By the twentieth century nearby caves were being hotly seized
and legal title endlessly challenged. The neighbouring chain, across
Houchins Valley in the Flint Ridge, opened the Great Onyx Cave in 1912.
By the 1920s, the Kentucky Cave Wars were in full swing. Rival owners
diverted tourists with fake policemen, employed stooges to heckle each
other's guided tours, burned down ticket huts, put out libellous and
forged advertisements. Cave exploration became so dangerous and secretive
that finally in 1941 the U.S. Government stepped in, made much of the
area a National Park and effectively banned caving. The gold rush of
tourists was, in any case, waning.

Convinced that the Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves were
all linked in a huge chain, of perhaps four hundred miles in extent,
explorers tried secret entrances for years, eventually winning official
backing. Throughout the 1960s all connections from Flint Ridge –
difficult and water-filled tunnels – ended frustratingly in
chokes of boulders. A “reed-thin” physicist, Patricia Crowther,
made the breakthrough in 1972 when she got through the Tight Spot and
found a muddy passage: it was a hidden way into the Mammoth Cave.

Under the terms of his owner's will, Stephen Bishop
was freed in 1856, at which time the cave boasted 226 avenues, 47 domes,
23 pits and 8 waterfalls. He died a year later, before he could buy his
wife and son, and achieve his ambition of farming in Argentina. In
the 1970s, Crowther's muddy passage was found on his map.

· · · · ·

One of Pat Crowther's caving companions was her husband,
Will, who had already used computer plotters to draw the group's maps.
He takes up the story:

I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game
called Dungeons and Dragons at the time [c. 1975], and also
I had been actively exploring in caves … Suddenly, I got involved
in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In
particular I was missing my kids. Also the caving had stopped, because
that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write
a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving,
and also would be a game for the kids … My idea was that it would be a computer
game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that
was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the
game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands.

(Quoted in Dale Peterson, Genesis II: Creation
and Recreation with Computers, 1983.) It's hard not to feel a certain
sadness that the first adventure game is shaped by these two lost souls,
Bishop and Crowther, each like Orpheus unable to draw his wife out of
the underworld.

Crowther's program (c. 1975), then, was a simulation
of the Bedquilt Cave area, owing its turn-based conversational style
to a medieval-fantasy adaptation of tabletop wargaming: E. Gary Gygax
and Dave Arneson's Dungeons and Dragons (1973–4). Nor
was the program without precedent, either in computing – ‘Hunt
the Wumpus’ (Gregory Yob, 1972) was a textual maze game, while
‘SHRDLU’ (Terry Winograd, 1972) had a recognisably
adventure-like parser – or in literature, where OuLiPo and other
ludic literary genres, especially in France, had tried almost every
permutation to make physical books more open-ended: Raymond Queneau's
Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1962) cut its pages into
strips so that the lines of ten sonnets could be mingled to form
1014 different outcomes.1 But the OuLiPo writers,
and earlier futurists, had thought more in terms of clockwork than
the computer: the literature machine's unashamed mindlessness a
provocation to the reader, in whom associations will be triggered.
Italo Calvino (in his 1969 lecture Cybernetics and Ghosts):

It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine
is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society.

To all intents and purposes, then, ‘Advent’
had invented a new category of computer program and of literature. The
aim was to explore, with five treasures hidden below and only a few of
the more “natural” puzzles as obstacles, such as the snake,
the dwarves and pirate, the first of the mazes and the limited battery
span of the caver's essential companion, the carbide lamp. Like the
real Bedquilt, the simulation has a map on about four levels of depth
and is rich in geological detail:

YOU ARE IN A SPLENDID CHAMBER THIRTY FEET HIGH. THE WALLS
ARE FROZEN RIVERS OF ORANGE STONE. AN AWKWARD CANYON AND A GOOD PASSAGE
EXIT FROM EAST AND WEST SIDES OF THE CHAMBER.

There are photographs of this chamber and of
the column that descends to it, which is of travertine, an orange mineral
found in wet limestone. The game's language is loaded with references
to caving, to “domes” and “crawls”. A “slab
room”, for instance, is a very old cave whose roof has begun
to break away into sharp flakes which litter the floor in a crazy heap.

Working at SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, in the spring of 1976, Don Woods discovered Crowther's
game among a number available to be played across the burgeoning
(110-computer) network ARPANET, the child of a shotgun wedding in 1969
between university and Department of Defense PDP-10 (and some other)
computers. The PDP-10, whose character set did not include lower case
letters – hence the capitals above, although elsewhere in the book
quotations from ‘Advent’ have been normalised – was
widely found to be a “friendly” computer for recreational
use, but more to the point it was a time-sharing computer on which
individual users could run programs much larger and more complex than
traditional games like the PDP-1's ‘Spacewar!’. With Crowther's
eventual blessing, but working entirely independently, Woods reworked
the caves and stocked them with magical items and puzzles, liberally
ignoring the original style from time to time. Much of the game's classic
quality comes from the tension between the original simulation, the
earnestly discovered caves with their mysterious etched markings and
spectacular chambers, and the cartoonish additions – the troll
bridge, the giant's house, the Oriental Room, the active volcano.
Crowther contributed an austere, Tolkienesque feel, in which magic is
scarce, and a well-judged geography, especially around the edges of the
map: the outside forests and gullies, the early rubble-strewn caves,
the Orange River Rock. Some of Woods's additions, such as the bear, were
sympathetic but others, such as the vending machine for fresh lamp
batteries, clashed against the original. But their strange collaboration
is somehow consistent. Stretching a point, you could say that there
is a Crowther and a Woods in every designer, the one intent on recreating
an experienced world, the other with a really neat puzzle which ought
to fit somewhere.

By 1977 tapes of ‘Advent’ were being
circulated widely, by the Digital user group DECUS, amongst others,
taking over lunchtimes and weekends wherever they went. The idea spread,
and diffused, as it surprised members of the general public who were
shown it by friends. In Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer prize-winning book
The Soul of a New Machine (1981), a journalist's-eye-view of
the building of a new model of company-sized computer, ‘Advent’
appears as an addiction, but more: while the engineers use the program
as a convenient endurance-test, for Kidder it is a cypher for an absorbing
inner world and, perhaps, an emerging personality. Another fascinated
visitor, the television
producer Patrick Dowling, created The Adventure
Game (BBC1 and BBC2, May 1980 to February 1986): by a curious
coincidence, his first choice as puzzle-deviser and scriptwriter was
Douglas Adams, then at the BBC but as it turned out unavailable. Adams
will reappear later. In the Game, Earth-people were tested by
the alien Argonds by being made to explore rooms stocked with items and
quite difficult puzzles in hope of finding drognas (the currency of
Arg), payment of which might placate His Highness the Rangdo, who had
adopted the body of an aspidistra plant with a tendency to shake and
roar when irritable. (And there may have been other anagrams of
“dragon”.) A recurring puzzle was a simple adventure game
running on, naturally, a BBC Micro, so that each week viewers would
see fresh contestants sit at the keyboard and twig, eventually, that
the “scarlet fish” was a red herring.

Most of the university departments then connected to
the ARPANET specialised in computer science, where any program is
an invitation to develop a further one. At Essex University, England,
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle developed the concept of ‘Advent’
into ‘Essex MUD’ (which ran from late 1979 to September
1987 and continues in different forms even today). MUD was a Multi-User
Dungeon to which remote users logged on during the night, competing
sometimes unkindly with each other – killing another player netted
1/24th of their points, which must otherwise be earned by the troublesome
business of finding treasures and dropping them into a swamp –
to become “wizards” in a fantasy landscape anglicised
slightly by the presence of a thatched cottage. To early phone-line
networks such as British Telecom's Prestel Gold and CompuServe, running
MUDs was (briefly) lucrative, and in a sense the Internet-connected
“deathmatch” tournaments of today's games like ‘Quake’
are the legacy of MUDs.

In 1979–81, “game assemblers” were
written in at least three departments to make new “Adventure-like
programs” – the plural “adventures” seems
not yet to have been used. Chris Gray and Alan Covington's
“Six/Fant” at the University of Alberta, Canada, and the
UCLA Computer Club's “Dungeon Definition Language” (which
later evolved into Tim Brengle and Ross Cunniff's ADL (1987)) deserve
mention. At Cambridge University, England, however, the assembler by
David Seal and Jonathan Thackray may have been the first “adventure
design system” to be used more widely than by its creators. Here
is some typical code, allowing the player to jump up to a hole only
if carrying the chair and in the room which actually has the hole:

The assembler was used to build sixteen games which
were the chief recreation on “Phoenix”, the IBM 370 mainframe
used by undergraduates and academic staff throughout the 1980s. These
were large, computationally expensive games, traditional in form and
very difficult, played outside of prime time when research palled.
“Well go and do some work then” is the parting shot of
‘Fyleet’ (Jonathan Partington, 1985). Titles tended to be
distinctive one-word commands, supposedly the names of ancient lands.
Some games were later released by Acornsoft and some later again by
Topologika, so that these are sometimes vaguely called “the
Topologika games”. But to anyone who was there, they are as redolent
of late nights in the User Area as the soapy taste of Nestlé's
vending machine chocolate or floppy, rapidly-yellowing line printer
paper. Adam Atkinson (author of ‘Nidus’, 1987), who still
has faint sketch-maps drawn on that paper more than ten years ago, has
recently worked with Paul David Doherty and Gunther Schmidl to recover
much of the Phoenix source code; many of the games have now returned to
play through mechanical translation to Inform.

‘Advent’ had no direct sequel as such,
but for the five years to 1982 almost every game created was another
‘Advent’. The standard prologue – middle game –
end game form would have, for prologue, a tranquil outside world (almost
always with a little building offering two out of three of a bunch of
keys, a bottle and a lamp); the middle game would be a matter of collecting
treasures from a cave and depositing them somewhere, while the end would
be called a “Master Game”. The secret canyons, cold spring
streams, wizards' houses, passive dragons, bears, trolls on bridges,
volcanos, mazes, silver bars, magic rings, lamps with limited battery
power, octagonal caverns with exits in all directions and so forth
recur endlessly in a potent, immediately recognisable blend. Publicity
surrounding the notorious Ace Paperbacks pirate edition (1965) of
The Lord of the Rings had helped make Tolkien's epic an American
campus classic of the late 1960s: ten years later, most of the cave
games can be seen to have superficial Tolkienisms, with elves, dwarves
(note the spelling) and dungeons called Moria. Unsurprisingly, then,
the first book adaptation in interactive fiction seems to have been
‘Lord’ (Olli J. Paavola, c. 1980), initially a mainframe
game at Helsinki.2 (The earliest ARPANET connections outside
America were to Britain and Scandinavia.) ‘Lord’ took pains
to be faithful to
the text, even to including the ballads.

You are standing now in Longbottom where Tobold Hornblower
once lived, the one who first grew the true pipe-weed in his gardens,
about the year 1070 according to Shire reckoning. To the south-east
is a narrow path.

It was characteristic of Tolkien, who died in 1973,
to think the Hobbit tobacco industry as “real” as the story
of the Ring, but it has been characteristic of Tolkien's imitators and
adaptors to prefer orcs and magic: ‘Lord’, though never
completed, has a true authenticity. Even here, though, the myth of
the cave game – the underground labyrinth linking the computers
– is as strong as the myth of Middle Earth. ‘Lord’
also has a Flathead coin and a postage stamp, in clear reference to
‘Dungeon’, the 1978 mainframe distribution of the game
before and afterwards called ‘Zork’.

At one extreme of the cave game is ‘Adventureland’
(Scott Adams, 1978), the first commercial game to reach the home: a tiny
set-piece for cassette tape-based microcomputers, written under vicious
memory constraints. “I'm in a temple” is as detailed as it
gets, but Adams's games are distinguished by weirdly errant grammar,
a wide vocabulary and a talent for arranging diverse objects in a room
to portray it:

At the other extreme is ‘Acheton’ (David
Seal, Jonathan Thackray, Jonathan Partington, 1978–80), probably
the largest game in the world in 1980, with 162 objects in 403 locations.
(The title is a confection of Acheron, the underworld, and Achates,
a character from the Aeneid.) Here is the lodestone room:

You are in a large featureless room whose walls
are composed entirely of a black magnetic material. Your compass seems
incapable of fixing on any direction as being north. Several passages
lead off to other parts of the cave.

This might easily be a room from ‘Advent’:
and for all that they vastly differ in scale, ‘Acheton’
and ‘Adventureland’ are recognisably the same game.

▲
As ‘Advent’ spread through universities, so it was often
reworked and altered. As with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the
vast number of mutated versions is evidence of popularity not just with
the audience (players) but with those who told the tale (programmers).
Chaucer's original manuscript is lost but all 83 surviving variants
are thought to derive from a single version copied from it. Here, it
is Crowther's 5-treasure original (c. 1975) which is gone, and all known
forms of ‘Advent’ build on Woods's 15-treasure extension of
June 1977, further diluting Crowther's contribution, that is, the
simulation aspect of play. (For a “filiation” almost as
complicated as Chaucer's, that is, a family tree showing how the many
versions relate to each other, see ftp.gmd.de.)
Most of these extensions are inferior works, making nervous and minor additions, but
three deserve passing mention. Don Woods made a further extension in
Autumn 1978 to a “20-treasure version (Revision 2)”, which
he still considers definitive: it made the modest addition of a reservoir
and cliff, scoring from 430 rather than 350 points. David Platt's 550-point
version (1979) has a “Valley of the Stone Faces” and a puzzle
bringing the volcano into play. Like Platt, David Long (1978) also felt
the need to add a sword-in-the-stone puzzle: Long's 501-point version
has some painful incongruities, such as a Wumpus and a telephone box,
but is actually not too bad.

▲
A port by Jay Jaeger for a (substantially souped-up)
kit-built Altair 8800 is claimed to be the first microcomputer version:
if so, it was not alone for long. Microsoft and Apple, unequal titans
of the future but contenders even then, followed with ‘Microsoft
Adventure’ (Gordon Letwin, 1979) and ‘Apple Adventure’
(Peter Schmuckal and Leonard Barshack, 1980) for Apple II and TRS-80.
Early commercial versions were faithful or trimmed, although Microsoft
added a “Software Den”, north of the Soft Room, containing
computers and a bearded programmer whose “spells help keep this
cave together”. (Cf. the RAM location in ‘Adventureland’,
or the appearance in person of the programmers of ‘Enchanter’.)
Level 9's multi-platform ‘Colossal Adventure’ (1983) also
has a classic feel but makes a confident extension, with a fleshed-out
landscape above ground including a spire and a hawthorn wood, and a
more satisfying end-game. The authors of the little-known but rather
good Spectrum 128K version ‘The Serf's Tale’ (Nigel Brooks
and Said Hassan, Players, 1986) seem familiar with Level 9's, and add
a mild intrigue (in cut-scenes, the player searches a dead body for
keys, and is helped by an innkeeper) on the way to the caves. ‘The
Serf's Tale’ takes embellishment to baroque extremes: “You
are in a splendid chamber shaped like the inside of an Arabian tower.
The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone that curve gently up to
a shadowy apex some thirty feet above your head. From this a huge stalactite
hangs like an inverted spire above the centre of the room.”
One wonders if Crowther would still have known his place.

§46.2 The commercial boom 1982–6

“Then Adventure hit MIT and everything changed.”
The response of a disparate group of students, an improvised imitation
called ‘Zork’, led to the founding of Infocom, in June
1979, which at its height six years later employed a hundred people:
its mainframe, “a fleet of red refridgerators” (Brian
Moriarty), had the electricity bill you would expect “if you
were running an aluminum smelter” (Marc Blank). An engaging image,
but extensive testing and packaging were also critical in establishing
Infocom as a quality brand in a self-created niche market. Infocom's
glory years have been romanticised by talk of its free soda, aloha
shirts and the Tuesday lunchtime meetings of the
Implementors of games – of whom there were never more than ten, and who were by no
means as free to do whatever they liked as their image suggested.
Too little credit has been given to department heads who were at least
as responsible for Infocom's artistic texture, notably John Prince (book
editor, lunch host and low-key manager of the Implementors) and Liz
Cyr-Jones (chief of testing, and the only woman to substantially influence
the creative process). “The staff dresses casually, and it appears
as if some of them have slept in their clothes, if they have slept at
all…”, wrote Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe (6 May 1984),
the most perceptive and least wide-eyed of their many journalist visitors.
There was pain on the way, particularly in the discovery that games
were to be the only viable product of the former MIT Dynamic Modelling
Group, and not merely an interim line. Unsavoury corporate dealings after
a buyout by another ailing company, together with the Implementors'
own faltering belief in text as the medium and the exhaustion of key
members of staff, made the winding-down of 1988–9 unnecessarily
dispiriting. But former hands mostly look back on the heyday as a happy,
one-time thing, like a summer romance.

Infocom was dominant for a period in the higher-end,
chiefly American market: in 1985 it always occupied several of the top
twenty positions in the SoftSel Hot List – industry-wide sales
charts run by a major US distributor – and one game held the
number one slot for nine months. But the company was not nearly so
visible outside the USA, where disc drives were less affordable, and
in any case had no monopoly on the basic idea. “The ‘adventure
boom’ is on – witness the rash of new programs, books and
even a specialist magazine.”3 Although many were short-lived
in what was something of a cottage industry, Hans Persson's catalogue
cites 329 production companies. For instance, in the UK, Acornsoft made
an early start: based in Cambridge and with close links to the university,
it had a ready-made supply of adventure designs and quickly released
reworkings of the Phoenix mainframe games for the BBC Micro –
Acorn's computer, but built to spearhead a national computer literacy
campaign supported by television programmes. Some of Acornsoft's titles
made tidy business (one of its authors earned royalties of around
£35,000 on games originally written with no thought of profit), but
in the end a market limited to a single model of microcomputer was
insufficient to support a large games company.

Looking back at the early microcomputers is like looking
at the fossils in ancient shale, before evolution took out three quarters
of the species, some of them weirder than anything living today. The
market had been entered by Apple, Commodore, Tandy (1977), Atari, Exidy
(1978), Acorn (1979), Sinclair (1980), Osborne, IBM (1981) and a dozen
others, whose machines were mutually incompatible in that software could
not easily be transferred from one model to another. Text adventures were
an exception, using little of the more complex hardware (for graphics
and sound) which really differentiated designs: also because a typical
adventure program is 90% map, text and other data tables, so that only
10% would need rewriting to move to a new machine. The more specialised
design companies got this division down to a fine art, and ‘Zork I’
was offered for 23 different microcomputers.

Infocom was incomparably the largest of these specialist
houses, the others directly employing five or six people at most. On
paper the main rivals were, in America, Scott Adams's Adventure International
(seventeen games, 1979–85); in Australia, Melbourne House (seventeen
highly variable games from different sources); in Britain, Level 9
(twenty games 1981–91, founded by the brothers Pete, Mike and
Nick Austin) and later Magnetic Scrolls (seven games 1984–90, founded
by Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon, 1984). In practice their markets –
geographical and by computer ownership – overlapped little so
that competition came not from each other, but from different genres
of game.

Right through the “golden age of text adventures”,
around two-thirds of the perhaps 1,000 adventure games published mixed
graphics with text, usually in the form of a picture accompanying each
room description. Sierra, still a major player in the games industry
today for its long-running King's Quest series, began this trend
as early as 1980 with ‘Mystery House’ (Roberta Williams).
Sales were so good that board game companies (Avalon Hill, Games Workshop)
dabbled in the market, and spin-offs from books, film and television
began to appear, though play seldom really engaged with the subject matter.
When ‘Dallas Quest’ (James Garon, 1984) confronts the player
with Miss Ellen, a bugle and a rifle, it is easy to guess which of the
three will prove to be decoration. Spinnaker/Telarium Software's
adaptations of two classics of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke's
‘Rendezvous with Rama’ (Ronald Martinez, 1984) and Ray
Bradbury's ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (Len Neufeld and Byron Preiss,
1984) deserve mention, though, as does the same company's
‘Amazon’ (1984), by the novelist and screen-writer Michael Crichton, later to
become famous for Jurassic Park but already hot property in
Hollywood. Thomas M. Disch, another novelist of real powers, went through
a wild surge of enthusiasm writing ‘Amnesia’ (1986), to
be followed by total disillusion when it was not marketed and received
as a novel might be. “The notion of trying to superimpose over
this structure [i.e., the adventure game] a dramatic conception
other than a puzzle was apparently too much for the audience.”
(Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers,
1990). The poet Robert Pinsky was more obliging with puzzle-based
play, as we shall see.

▲
“Once I was deluxe; now I am debris” (Adrian Belew).
1980s graphics are often crude and few players can tolerate them, so
that these 600 or so games lie in almost total neglect today and even
Infocom's four late graphical titles are made playable on modern
machines more out of piety than appreciation.4 Nevertheless, graphical
adventures were once formidable rivals and the idea that graphics should
voluntarily be given up required selling. “You'll never see
Infocom's graphics on any computer screen,” boasted early advertisements,
making a virtue of necessity: the games were supposedly too evocative
and too cerebral, as was implied by the photograph of a brain. It
would be truer to say that Infocom's graphics were instead in the highly
crafted and colourful booklet built into each game's box lid, which
often contained clues (partly as an anti-piracy measure). Inspired
perhaps by the success of Kit Wright's book of paintings Masquerade,
which encoded the location of a buried golden hare, Acornsoft offered
a prize for the first correct solution of ‘Castle of Riddles’
(Peter Killworth, 1984) which – it was laid on pretty thick
– was so fiendish that the prize would take quite some winning.
A similar prize for ‘Eureka’ (Ian Livingstone, Domark, 1984)
offered a whopping £25,000. Another strategy was to extol the sophistication
of a parser, and how very far it soared above the mulish ignorance of
a shoddy two-word job. Thus Magnetic Scrolls's ‘The Pawn’
was sold partly on its celebrated claim to understand “use the
trowel to plant the pot plant in the plant pot”. Publicity for
Melbourne House's ‘The Hobbit’, a huge success in Britain,
stressed that only the presence on the programming team of an expert
in linguistics (Stuart Richie) had enabled the invention of “Inglish”,
as the parser's subset of English was called. In a similar bid for dignity,
Infocom soon distanced itself from the boy-scout “adventure game”
and the nerdile “computerized fantasy simulation”, instead
billing its product first as “Interlogic” (1982) and then
“interactive fiction” (1984), which remains the preferred
euphemism today.

· · · · ·

Though cave games became old hat, more cohesive fantasies
and overt miscellanies and treasure hunts had continued unabated as
the mechanics of ‘Advent’ lived on in the guise of different
genres. John Laird's ‘Haunt’ (begun 1978, and known to the
authors of ‘Zork’) may in fact be the first non-cave game,
but its vampire-haunted house has ‘Advent’-like puzzles based
on combining objects (throw turpentine on a poor painting to reveal
a Rembrandt). ‘Haunt’ is not inspired, but the knockabout
style and the unexpected arrival of James Watt from the Department of
the Interior wanting to buy the house for $10,000,000 liven things up.
Camp horror-movie settings, usually featuring Dracula or Frankenstein
and set in large houses even more haphazardly stocked than caves (Chris
Gray's ‘Mansion’ (1980) somehow works in a submarine), vied
with science fiction and spy thrillers as the most popular variations.
Alien worlds and derelict spacecraft, caves of steel so to speak, initially
lent themselves to works of fairly high seriousness such as ‘Starcross’
(Dave Lebling, 1982), which is heavily indebted to Arthur C. Clarke's
Rendezvous with Rama (again) and to Larry Niven's Known
Space stories, from which it borrowed red and blue stepping discs.
Level 9's ‘Snowball’ (Mike, Nick and Pete Austin, 1983),
set on an interstellar colony ship, and Peter Killworth's ‘Countdown
to Doom’ (1984) for Acornsoft and Topologika, set on Doomawangara
(a hostile planet, not a region of the Australian outback), are equally
steeped in golden-age science fiction.

More often, the future became a vehicle for comedy,
usually in the form of sending up or camping up traditional science
fiction, with one notable exception. Douglas Adams's radio series
and novel The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the Three
Men in a Boat of the 1970s, achieved enormous success. To computer
hackers it became a devotional text, like the Monty Python sketches
it owed considerable debts to,5 especially in Adams's
invariable practice of having the “straight man” in any
conversation argue back. For all its playful anything-goes imagination,
it is not a send-up but a genuine work of science fiction in the sense
of social analysis: Adams mocks something large enough to be worth
mocking, i.e., real life, rather than pulp sci-fi and flying-saucer
movies. With an electronic, interactive encyclopaedia as narrator and
an author fascinated by textual gadgetry, Adams's comedy was a natural
for adaptation to adventure-game form and his collaboration with Steve
Meretzky at Infocom produced their bestselling title (1984). Imitations
became commonplace.

It is often forgotten, because this is not how we
think of “classic text
adventures”, that many early games
were earnestly or drably serious in tone. ‘Advent’ itself
contains relatively little humour, despite one comedy room (Witt's
End) and infrequent moments of drollery from the narrator:

A glistening pearl falls out of the clam and rolls
away. Goodness, this must really be an oyster. (I never was very good
at identifying bivalves.)

The distinctive comedy running, sometimes only as an
underground stream, through all of Infocom's games has its source instead
in ‘Zork’ which, partly because it contains many more inessential
responses than ‘Advent’ (responses, that is, which a player
winning the game need never see), gives a much stronger impression of
personality: shaped by ‘Zork’, by inheritance of parsing
code from one game to another and by a shared in-house testing team,
the strongest unity of style between the Infocom games is that they seem
told by essentially the same narrator. This is a theme that will recur
in §48.

With a growing catalogue in the mid-1980s, Infocom's
mature style was to make conscious use of genre to differentiate its
products, essential since a core audience, subscribing to a newsletter,
had formed and would buy many of its titles: also, of course, for
the fun of it. Any player dropped into the middle of one of ‘The
Lurking Horror’ (H. P. Lovecraft horror), ‘Leather
Goddesses of Phobos’ (racy send-up of 1930s space opera) or
‘Ballyhoo’ (mournfully cynical circus mystery) would immediately
be able to say which it was. (‘TLH’, Dave Lebling, 1987;
‘LGOP’, Steve Meretzky, 1986; ‘BH’, Jeff O'Neill,
1985.) Infocom also evolved a police procedural “detective novel”
format rarely used since, which differed from any number of spy intrigues
in that it involved character interaction and a developing case, rather
than simply an ‘Advent’-style exploration in which an enemy
base replaced the caves. Today's designers are not always so definite
in keying a game to an established genre of fiction, but the first decisions
remain to choose the style, the mood, the character of the protagonist
and above all the fictional world of which the story itself will remain
only a part.

Infocom achieved popular success in the mid-1980s and
continues to be highly rated now, but to some extent for different games.
The 1984 and 1985 bestsellers, ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide To The
Galaxy’ and ‘Wishbringer’ (Brian Moriarty) are now
found solidly mediocre, charming but insubstantial. Critical acclaim
flickers instead to ‘Trinity’ (1986), as lightning flickers
to an aerial, because the game opens with something of the mood of an
art-house movie, because it is bookish and purposeful – a research
bibliography is supplied – and because it is obtrusively trying
to be what today's critics most wish to find: literature. Here is Brian
Moriarty, a self-analysing and intensely driven designer, ambitious
for worldly success but describing himself in the credits as a member
of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and a man who remains a
name in the games industry today:

I amassed a pretty substantial library on the history of
the atomic bomb … I went to the Trinity site [of Oppenheimer's
first test] itself, visited Los Alamos and a lot of museums and I talked
to a couple of people who were actually there … I wanted people,
when playing the game, to feel their helplessness. Because that's what
I felt when I was reading and talking to these people and seeing these
places. You could just feel the weight of history on you.

‘Trinity’ is not altogether dark, nor
innovative in its basic mechanics, with an extensive slice of
‘Zork’-like terrain and some mischievous animals. A black
cover with mushroom cloud wrapped a typically deluxe and supportive
book-shaped package which included a map of the Trinity test site, a
sundial, instructions for folding an origami crane and a spoof 1950s
The Illustrated History of the Atom Bomb comic for boys (by Carl
Genatossio). Sales were tepid at best, albeit in part because the game
played only on larger and therefore less widely owned computers. Had
it sold no further even than to his mother, though, Moriarty's reputation
would still rest secure upon ‘Trinity’ today.

All the same, for the origins of the deliberate artistic
statement in interactive fiction one should look further back. Mike
Berlyn had been instrumental in subverting the genre's initial “puzzles
for treasures” definition, and the closing scenes of his ‘Infidel’
(1983, with Patricia Fogleman), re-enacting the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, are arguably the earliest to be guided for consciously literary
ends. Where ‘Infidel’ is clearly a plotted novel,
‘Mindwheel’ (Robert Pinsky, coding by Steve Hales and William
Mataga, Synapse, 1984) is a puckish dream-poem, Dante meets Alice
Through the Looking-Glass. The protagonist wakes to find that one
Doctor Virgil is guiding him to meet some popular entertainers (rock
singers and baseball players), some chatty, debauched insects and
“your broccoli-coloured companion”, a frog who keeps up
self-deprecating chatter throughout the game:

“Again!” says the frog. “Again
we're in a situation of this kind. And I turned down a nice job, summer
replacement for the little dog in Monopoly!”

But there are also transfigured victims out of Bruegel
or Bosch, such as the children with the heads of birds who police the
snowy, complacent mind of a Generalissimo. Opposition is provided by
the more playful Spaw, a demon wearing “lawyerskin boots”.
Puzzles include sonnet-writing and an end-game based on human chess with
different puzzles on each square, the player advancing pawn-like (there
are several possible paths, since captures can be made) to the eighth
rank. Pinsky – noted for semi-formal verse with a social aspect
– was named the US Poet Laureate in 1997, and what he now calls
his “computerized novel” is not easy to dismiss.
‘Mindwheel’ was the first of four nightmarish games by
Synapse Software: ‘Breakers’ (Rod Smith, Joe
Vierra and William Mataga, 1986) is a tale of indentured labour with “coercive
interrogation techniques” and the starship ‘Essex’ (Bill
Darrah, 1985) lends a similar mood of persecution. Only ‘Brimstone:
The Dream of Gawain’ (James Paul, David Bunch and Bill Darrah, 1985)
– doubly unreal as a dream by an Arthurian knight – resembled
ordinary adventure fodder. The line was terminated by Broderbund in 1986,
which had bought the company but was now alarmed by a rape scene and
some Chinese black magic. The computer games audience was sliding downward
in age.

▲
Infocom's intention to explore byways of the new medium was genuine, but
not of course altruistic, and its business history throws a good deal
of light on its decisions. The extent of Infocom's commercial success
is often exaggerated, not in its scale (at one time a quarter of U.S.
homes owning computers had bought the product) but in its duration.
Typical sales per new title rose from 10,000 in 1981 to 50,000 in 1983–6,
falling below 20,000 again in 1987–9. The exceptions were the
‘Zork’ trilogy, which sold 1,000,000 units over the decade
– which explains if not excuses the later sequels – and
‘The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy’ at 250,000, which
explains Infocom's eagerness to write ‘The Restaurant at the End
of the Universe’. Sales were further buttressed by customer loyalty,
carefully nurtured by large direct mail shots (at end of 1986, circulation
of the newsletter was 240,000); by repackaging of 1980–2 titles;
and by a no-returns policy in distribution (ended in 1987) obliging
shopkeepers to treat Infocom's wares as luxury goods, kept on shelves
until they sold. Remarkably, ‘Suspended’ (1983), not an
obvious money-spinner, was to receive a Gold certificate for 100,000
sales in 1986: typical shelf times today are measured in months or even
weeks. Infocom's customers were, according to market research, adult
(75% over 25) – which is not so surprising given prices of $40
to $50 – and heavy readers, 80% of them men, though specific products
were designed to appeal to women (such as ‘Plundered Hearts’
and the mysteries) and to children (Stu Galley adapted the
‘Seastalker’ parser to children's sentence structures, observed
during testing). The work force had grown fast (1981, two; 1982, four;
1983, twenty; 1984, fifty; 1985, one hundred) but was increasingly
preoccupied with managing itself and with Infocom's one business product,
the database ‘Cornerstone’ (1986). It was intended to capitalise
on Infocom's expertise in virtual machines, which allowed large programs
– adventure games – to run on a variety of different designs
of small computer: but this was not the strength in 1986 that it would
have been in 1982, since the IBM PC had grown in capacity and cornered
the business market, most of the rival manufacturers having gone bust
in 1983–4. ‘Cornerstone’ sold 10,000 but only after
a price reduction from $495 to $100, and by then Infocom had turned the
corner into loss. In June 1986 Activision had bought Infocom, in what
amounted to an agreed merger, for stock valued at around $8 million: at
about five years' gross income, this was a high price, or would have
been if the stock had in fact been worth that. Infocom still had fifteen
titles ahead, including a few of its best, but disputes over branding,
marketing and the division of profits and losses produced disquiet, as
did a time-consuming lawsuit about the
state of the books when the company
changed hands; while Activision had its own travails. Expected sales
from the Hitchhiker's sequel ‘Restaurant’ were an essential
part of the business plan every year from 1985 to 1989, while Meretzky,
Lebling, Jeff O'Neill and Amy Briggs were each briefly in the frame
as the unlucky programmer. The project was stymied in 1985–6 by
Douglas Adams's inability to get out of the bath when copy deadlines
loom – “you can't fault him for personal hygiene in a
crisis” (Geoffrey Perkins) – and by 1987–9 meant
impossible collaborations with the British firm Magnetic Scrolls and
other intermediaries, whom the Implementors were unable to establish
working relationships with. Games by out-house employees got a little
further: though Berlyn's came to nothing, Blank wrote ‘Journey’
from California and newcomer Bob Bates designed ‘Sherlock’ and
‘Arthur’. (Bates worked from his notionally independent
company Challenge, but its finances were at that time heavily dependent
on advances from Infocom.) Without conscious decision, Infocom was
becoming a commissioning house rather than a workshop. The testing
department was involved so late on that the new management saw it as
largely an obstruction. Artistic collapse came in 1988, when four of the
six remaining creative figures were fired or felt unable to go on (editor
John Prince, tester Liz Cyr-Jones, Implementors Jeff O'Neill and
Amy Briggs). Meretzky and Lebling remained, sometimes despondent, sometimes
cheerful, doing largely terrible work. The weekly game-design lunches
became at the last a charade, attended by random managers whom they
barely knew. Infocom never went bust as such, but by 1989 market conditions
would have obliged any management to salvage the Infocom brand-names while
abandoning text for largely graphical games. The company now called
Activision (following a second, happier merger) did just this with a
fresh generation of game designers in the 1990s. For all that they were
doing something quite different and thousands of miles away, many had
a keen sense of standing in an Infocom tradition. Activision's omnibus
1990s reissues of the Infocom text games achieved unexpectedly high
sales, to everybody's pleasure.

§46.3 The growth of a community c. 1985–91

One by one, the companies ceased to publish text-based
games: Adventure International (1985), Synapse (1986), Infocom (1989),
Level 9 (1991), Topologika (1992), Magnetic Scrolls (1992). The last
stalwart, Legend Entertainment – which had inherited two of the
designers of Infocom's last days, Bob Bates and Steve Meretzky –
made the last mainstream release of a game with a parser in 1993
(‘Gateway II: Homeworld’, by Mike Verdu and Glen Dahlgren)
and so, according to some, the dark ages began: the adventure games which
flourished in the marketplace were fiction of a kind, and steerable,
but no longer interactive in any conversational sense. Yet the same
advance of technology which drove the irresistable rise of graphics
and animation also brought interactive fiction writing into the home.
Between 1980 and 1990 the
personal computer went from being barely
able to play a text game to being easily able to compile one.

To be able to program a PDP-10, as Crowther and Woods
had, was a professional qualification, but early microcomputers came
with the easily learned programming language BASIC built in, and
also with manuals which emphasised that computers were more for writing
your own programs than for using other people's. Minimal adventure
programming is not complicated – indeed adventure game-writing has
been used to teach children about computing (Creating a Database,
1985, Steve Rodgers and Marcus Milton) – and the slowness of a
program written in BASIC does not much matter for a text adventure.
So, parallel to the commercial market and at the cheaper end merging
into it, hobbyists had had been devising their own adventures since at
least May 1979, when Lance Micklus published ‘Dog Star Adventure’
in a computing magazine. This was the first of many type-it-in-yourself
games which some readers, at least, adapted and reworked as they typed.
Scott Adams's ‘Adventureland’ source was itself published
in Byte (1980) and, within a year, reworked into the core of
Brian Howarth's rival ‘Mysterious Adventures’. (No less
than three Scott Adams-format adventure-making programs existed for
the TI-99/4a microcomputer alone, and Adams-format games in circulation
outnumber his official titles by at least three to one.) Dozens of
books with titles like Adventure Games For Your Commodore 64
(Duncan Quirie, 1984) consisted of little more than unannotated and
– partly because of the need to save every possible byte of memory
– almost incomprehensible BASIC listings, often rushed into print
by coders with more enthusiasm than skill, and seldom properly tested.

The major companies each had in-house systems for
designing adventure games (see §41 for a
sample of Infocom's ZIL): these never emerged into the public eye.
But a popular design tool called The Quill (Graeme Yeandle,
1983), running on the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 microcomputers,
allowed many hobbyists working from home to sell their wares. Yeandle's
generous acknowledgement in the manual that the system “has its
origins in an article written by Ken Reed and published in the August
1980 issue of Practical Computing” is further testament to the
influence of 1979–80 magazines in spreading the word. At least
60 commercial releases in the period 1983–6 were Quilled.
(Graphic Adventure Creator (Sean Ellis, 1986), was also popular
later on. Two corresponding American commercial systems, Adventure
Writer and Adventure Master were less fruitful.) Yet tiny
BASIC games were inevitably toy models of the real thing, and even
The Quill could not then build a port of ‘Advent’
(though extensions of it, such as the Professional Adventure
Writer (1987), later did), let alone an Infocom-scale game.

Some 33 non-commercial design systems are now present
at ftp.gmd.de, though some have fallen into disuse, some are
flimsy at best and others are exercises in writing a Pascal-like compiler,
or a LISP-like compiler, which pay too much attention to syntax and
do not engage with the real issue: the world model and how designers
can work with and alter it. During 1995–9, only two systems have
been widely used: the Text Adventure Development System (or TADS, Mike
Roberts, 1987) and Inform (Graham Nelson, 1993). A further two retain
interested minorities and remain in the running: Hugo (Kent Tessman,
1994) and revamped forms of the Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT, David
R. Malmberg and Mark Welch, 1985–7). Note the dates, implying
both the durability of a capable system and the difficulty in getting
a new one off the ground. All four have been continuously developed since
their inception, to some extent bidding each other up in richness or
complexity.

Design systems of the 1980s had the consistent ambition
of easing the way of the neophyte programmer, who would if possible never
be asked really to program at all: only to supply textual descriptions,
in effect filling in a database. “Alan is not a programming
language. Instead Alan takes a descriptive view,” says its manual
(by Thomas Nilsson), and the Generic Adventure Games System manual (Mark
Welch) concurs:

It [GAGS] cannot be used to write an adventure game
with as many complex features as Infocom's. To do so … would require
adventure-game writers to learn a very complex set of rules.

This is the bargain that was, with some reluctance,
accepted around 1992 – a crucial year, as we shall see.

· · · · ·

Changing conditions of computer networking have,
throughout this story, had greater effect than the changing technology
of the computers themselves. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, tools
such as Unix and games like ‘Spacewar!’ spread through
outposts of the early Internet much as, in the dark ages, classical
texts flowed down monastic libraries along the Rhine and the Loire,
always subtly rewritten until it seemed no definitive version remained.
(We have already seen what this did to ‘Advent’.)
By the mid-1980s, universities and institutions across at least the
Western world were securely networked, but the same could not yet be
said of home computers and small businesses.

Enthusiasts for writing interactive fiction could
achieve little until there was enough mutual contact for non-commercially
distributed design systems and games to spread around. Usenet, a
wide-ranging system of discussion forums or “newsgroups”,
was created in 1979 and roughly doubled in usage each year:
but in 1985 it still only accounted for 375 postings per day, across
all topics combined, and as late as 1989 it was still possible for a
single person to skim through the entire traffic. In America, the hundreds
of local dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) and their big brother,
the American CompuServe service, had greater effect. Much as the creators
of Usenet called it “the poor man's ARPANET”, bulletin
boards were a poor man's FTP: allowing downloading of files from archives
with only a modem and without the need for a university or corporate
Internet connection. Even as late as 1993, downloads of ‘Curses’
(say) from CompuServe rivalled those from ftp.gmd.de. From
1982, when the concept of “shareware” was invented, quality
home-made software was routinely “shared” on these boards
and via discs ordered from the Public Software Library, subject to
a moral obligation for users to “register” by paying the
original author a small fee. TADS and some of the better early TADS
games were administered as shareware by High Energy Software, a company
with its own BBS. AGT was also available from the BBS community, and
the Byte Information Exchange, and as discs which could be ordered
from Softworks, a member company of the Association of Shareware
Professionals.

Judith Pintar's story (from an interview in
XYZZYnews 11) shows how fruitful this contact could be:

I started writing IF in the mid-80s, when the XT I bought
happened to have GAGS [1985] on it … When I joined CompuServe in
1990, I tried to find Mark Welch, to register GAGS, and discovered that
it had become AGT and was administered by the co-author, David R. Malmberg.
He had run several annual game-writing contests, and I was determined
to enter … ‘CosmoServe’ [1991] tied for first place. [In
1992] I had the idea of writing a game as part of a group venture. I
posted this idea in CompuServe's Gamer's forum, and a small group of
people responded. … We were given a private area on the forum
to post our messages to one another and to share game files.

‘Shades of Gray’ (1992), by Mark Baker,
Steve Bauman, Elizabeth Ellison, Mike Laskey, Hercules, Cynthia Yans
and Pintar herself, duly won. The AGT contest began as a GAGS contest
in 1986, to promote interest, then ran annually 1987–93 and, though
no longer tied to any game design system, essentially resumed in 1995
as the rec.arts.int-fiction competition.

§46.4 Newsgroups and revival 1992–

The rest of the infrastructure of the present interactive
fiction community was created by four almost simultaneous events: first,
the creation of specific Usenet
newsgroups (on or before 21 March 1992,
21 September 1992), moving away from sporadic and easily drowned-out talk
in the early net.games and the later rec.games.programming,
while asserting an artistic medium by moving to the rec.arts.*
sub-hierarchy, where theatre and the novel are also discussed. Next,
the founding of the interactive fiction archive at ftp.gmd.de
by Volker Blasius and David M. Baggett (24 November 1992), the release
of TADS 2.0 (6 December 1992), significant because it established
the dominance of TADS, and the release of Inform 1 (10 May 1993), though
not until 1995 was Inform seriously used.

The proximity of these dates is no coincidence: they
followed the sudden, widespread and cheap release of the entire Infocom
back catalogue, in two volumes, Lost Treasures of Infocom I
(January 1992) and II (July 1992), which stimulated a revival
both of the cult of Infocom and of interactive fiction in general.
If Infocom is to be compared with Shakespeare then this was the First
Folio. Anybody who had occasionally liked Infocom's games in the past
suddenly had all of them, while players' expectations of quality rose.
Infocom antiquarianism occupies much of the early newsgroup traffic;
much of the initial stock at ftp.gmd.de consisted of fact-sheets
on Infocom story files; and the collectors of these diamonds were provided
with a rhinestone machine when Inform, which compiled Infocom-format
story files, appeared. Design systems successful in the mid-1980s,
which were not well-adapted to build Infocom-scale games, quickly
died out. Instead TADS and Inform were used for a clump of large games
plausibly imitating Infocom's production values, among them ‘Save
Princeton’ (Jacob Solomon Weinstein, 1992), ‘Horror of
Rylvania’ (Dave Leary, 1993), ‘Curses’ (Graham Nelson,
1993), ‘The Legend Lives!’ (David M. Baggett, 1993),
‘Theatre’ (Brendon Wyber, 1994), ‘Christminster’
(Gareth Rees, 1995), ‘Jigsaw’ (Graham Nelson, 1995),
‘Perdition's Flames’ (Mike Roberts, 1995) and so on.

The revival by Gerry Kevin Wilson of an annual
game-designing competition, fondly remembered by AGT and CompuServe users,
took place in September 1995, though the 1996 event (with 26 entries)
marked the beginning of its real importance. There was no restriction
to any specific design system, as was typical of a newsgroup which
has consistently voted against dividing itself off into subsections such
as comp.lang.tads or comp.lang.inform. However,
the rule that a contest game should be solvable in two hours, albeit
often more honoured in the breach, has had a decisive effect in diverting
designers from Infocom-sized “novels” into short stories.
This freed up the form for greater experimentation, but meant that
few large games were created in the late 1990s. The annual September
event – shrewdly timed, after long university vacations –
has also had the unfortunate effect that games are held back and
then all released at once, in the breaking of a monsoon after a parched summer.
But for the quantity of fine work stimulated, and the number of newcomers
attracted, the competition can only be considered a triumph. Its
success has also spun off a number of alternative contests and forms
of recognition, such as the annual and Oscar-like XYZZY Awards. The
most ludic, madcap events are the SpeedIF contests, begun by David
Cornelson in October 1998, in which just two hours are allowed to
write a complete game. The rubric for SpeedIF 13: “The game
will take place in a Chinese restaurant. It will feature one or more
of the following animals: pigeon, elephant or badger. There will be
some kind of sculpture made of mud, and some character will be obsessed
with either HAL or Doraemon, the robot-cat from the future (or
both)…”

A growing appreciation of the medium's potential for
art has characterised turn of the century interactive fiction. One
provocative example was Nick Montfort's showing of a hardback edition
of ‘Winchester's Nightmare’ at Digital Arts and Culture
in Atlanta, in October 1999: ten decommissioned laptops converted
to run an Inform game. Formerly property of the Internal Revenue Service,
several still bore the U.S. Treasury seal of an eagle holding a key.
Even shown in images on a web page, it was startling as a work of
conceptual art, and challenged the unconscious assumption that an
interactive fiction need be intrinsically unlike a material book.
Chris Klimas's affecting short story ‘Mercy’, and Andrew
Plotkin's shifting vignette ‘The Space Under The Window’,
were influential in the late 1990s style for non-game games. Marnie
Parker organises art shows which challenge traditional aspirations
for IF by encouraging artistic expression. Making an exception to
this chapter's general rule of stopping history at the close of 1999,
it seems appropriate to finish with two fine debut pieces which took
awards in the 2000 Art Show: ‘Galatea’ (Emily Short, 2000),
a conversation with an animated sculpture which breaks new ground in
interactive dialogue; and ‘The Cove’ (Kathleen Fischer, 2000),
an evocative seascape which is also a gathering of memories. Interactive
fiction will always appreciate what in theatre used to be called “the
well-made play”, the polished entertainment on traditional lines,
but without its radicals it will die. Though the grail of puzzle-free
yet interactive literature seems as elusive as ever, it is too soon
to stop looking.

▲
And what of the history of the theory of interactive fiction?
For most of the last twenty years, the best published sources are chapters
which, like this one, hide at the back of books on game programming:
thus, Chapter 8 of Peter Killworth's How to Write Adventure Games
for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron (1984), Chapter
7 of the Alan manual, Appendix B to the TADS manual. (Even people who
don't intend ever to use TADS should read the delightfully written TADS
manual.) Most are couched in the form of avuncular advice (“No
matter how small an Adventure you
write, it will take far, far more
time and effort than you thought it would” – Killworth) but
there are often clear signs of groping towards a systematic critical
model of what the essential ingredients of a game might be. Basic
Adventure and Strategy Game Design for the TRS-80 (Jim Menick,
1984), a turgid work, talks about “layering” complications
into “phases”. Others, such as A. J. Bradbury's book,
quoted above, or the somewhat gauche Player's Bill of Rights
(Usenet posting, 1993), boil opinions down to (usually ten) golden
rules. Bradbury's are well-supported by argument and engage with the
underlying fiction and not simply the surface puzzles: for instance,
“resist the urge to create a superhero” of the game's
protagonist.

•REFERENCES
For interactive fiction history, see the Infocom Fact Sheet
by Paul David Doherty, the Level 9 Fact Sheet by Miron Schmidt
and Manuel Schulz and the Magnetic Scrolls Fact Sheet by
Stefan Meier and Gunther Schmidl. Hans Persson's Adventureland
catalogue and the master index of ftp.gmd.de are also
indispensable. On connections with literary precursors, see Gareth
Rees's 1994 article Tree fiction. The number of games said
to have origins before 1979 is somewhat akin to the number of American
families claiming descent from the Mayflower pilgrims and one
must approach claims to priority with caution. But it is clear that
too little is known about the games libraries in circulation in the
mid-1970s. Peter Langston's ‘Wander’ (1974), a text-based
world modelling program included in his PSL games distribution for Unix
and incorporating rooms, states and portable objects, was at least a
proto-adventure: perhaps many others existed, but failed to find a
Don Woods to complete the task? So much appears lost that even Crowther's
original source code, the most important document we might want to see,
appears not to have existed anywhere since 1977. (Crowther confirms
that he now has no printouts or notes of it.) In the discussion of
authorship above I have therefore relied on anecdotal accounts in print
quoting Crowther and Woods, and on recent and valuable research by
Dennis G. Jerz.
•The Longest Cave, by Roger
Brucker and Richard Watson, includes a history of the Bedquilt Cave.
•It is difficult to estimate the
extent of the literature with any reliability. The ftp.gmd.de
archive contains over 1,700 games which have been finished and offered
to some kind of audience, and this necessarily excludes some material
still under copyright or simply lost. Hans Persson's catalogue (surely
incomplete) lists around 800 commercial publications in the 1980s,
of which 330 are purely textual. The well-established canon of
“important” or “classic” games still talked
about today consists of about 100 titles. At most fifty titles of the
1990s remain in regular play through being rediscovered.
•The Quill and its variants
continued even into the 1990s, at least for the prolific Dorothy Millard,
whose games are off-beat variations of “you are stranded”:
the most off-beat of all being ‘Yellow Peril’ (1994), in
which the entire world has become yellow.
•1993 was the year of the explosion
of the World Wide Web, during which it grew by a factor of 3,000. But
in 1992, personal web pages barely existed, and it seemed not only natural
but unavoidable to house games at a centralised library, ftp.gmd.de.
The continued importance of this IF-archive is a major part of the solidarity
of today's community.

2
‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’
(1978), by the remarkable Greg Hassett – then aged twelve –
had better be disqualified, unless Jules Verne's original really has
a coke machine, a troll's palace and a car repair shop.

3 Thus A. J. Bradbury, in
Adventure Games for the Commodore 64 (1984, with variant editions
for other microcomputers), a wide-ranging and thoughtful book: for
instance Bradbury discusses defects in ‘Philosopher's Quest’
(arbitrary) and ‘The Hobbit’ (too little thought to different
possible orders of play – perhaps this is why many winning lines
score more than 100%), advocates mapping on a linked-octagon grid
and so on. The magazine alluded to is Micro Adventurer, edited
by Graham Cunningham and published by the small press Sunshine Books.
It ran for thirteen issues from November 1983, moving gradually away
from snippets of program listings as reviews and general articles took
over.

4
While Spectrum and early PC graphics are often
unbearable, the Atari ST and Amiga offered a better colour palette
and resolution: in these versions, the Magnetic Scrolls games were
well illustrated. Of lower-resolution games, ‘Asylum’
(William Denman), ‘Sherwood Forest’ and ‘Masquerade’
(Dale Johnson) are recommendable.

5 ‘Advent’ quotes from
Python's Parrot Sketch: try feeding the bird. As for Adams,
‘Lord’ has a babel fish and ‘Acheton’ a ningy.